The Feeder (17 page)

The men I killed used women, degrading and often abusing them. Men like these had caused my sister nothing but misery in her life and eventually led her to her death.

I wasn’t afraid of getting caught. Now that Camille was gone I had no reason to stick around. If the cops caught up to me there were plenty of ways I could end my life without needing a bullet. If caught, I would die in jail but I wouldn’t be there for long.

I did things differently now. Rather than leave a grisly mess for the police to find, I disposed of the bodies discreetly by dumping them in the ocean. I began taking my father’s boat out fishing on a regular basis, cruising out into the Strait of Georgia. Weighted with rocks and down they went, to become food for crabs and other bottom feeders, never to be seen again. I lost track of how many victims I dumped in the ocean and never gave any of them a second thought until the feet started washing up on shore about six months after my first murder.

It wasn’t the first time severed feet had been found on the shore. It started several years ago with the discovery of a foot on a beach on Bowen Island. A person walking a dog noticed what looked like a shoe but on closer inspection they discovered a foot inside the shoe. In the years that followed, several feet had washed up on various shores. A few were identified as belonging to missing people but the origin of the others remained a mystery.

The mystery of the feet was actually not much of a mystery at all. The reason only feet were being found was quite simple. When a body decomposes underwater, it falls apart at the weakest points. The ankle is one of the weakest joints in the body, so the feet have a tendency to separate as tissues break down. The feet reappeared because they were still inside running shoes, which floated.

When feet started showing up again following my murders, I was a little worried until it became clear that there was no evidence to incriminate me. After the first few feet washed up on shore, I was careful to remove the shoes before dumping the body. I dropped the shoes in the Goodwill donation box or left them where homeless people would find them.

The funny part was, not all of the feet found belonged to my victims. At least one of them was a woman’s foot. A couple of others might have been mine, but were never identified.

Only one foot that was identified belonged to one of my victims. Foul play was not suspected in his death because apparently the man had been suffering from depression and had suicidal tendencies. It was no wonder he was bummed out. He couldn’t even get laid without paying for sex in junkieville. I’d done him a favor by putting him out of his misery.

After a while, killing no longer held the same appeal it did in the beginning. I wasn’t quite sure what had changed, or at what precise moment the change had taken place. I simply woke up one morning without the desire to kill. Maybe I’d become bored with it or maybe I’d finally gotten it out of my system. Either way, I saw it as a positive sign.

Eighteen months after Camille’s murder, I felt like I might be able to carry on without her. I dared to believe that my healing had begun.

~ Chapter 24 ~

Creepy Pete

I’d sworn off killing; really, I had. The springtime trip to my father’s cabin, which was now my cabin, near Harrison Lake was a sabbatical to help me get my head straightened out once and for all.

I needed to figure out what I was going to do with my life from that point forward now that I had stopped killing. It was like quitting drinking. Waking up from an alcoholic haze with no idea where to go from there.

The cabin held many fond memories for me; memories that didn’t include Camille. She had never been the outdoorsy type. She hadn’t enjoyed the cabin, guns or hunting and fishing. Most of the trips I had taken there had been with my father alone. It was a place of male bonding and of solitude; the good kind of solitude that didn’t involve loneliness or loss. I made the trip up there in early May, during a stretch of unseasonably warm weather. It was the perfect time to take my quad for a good run.

I pulled into the Esso station in the tiny tourist-trap village of Harrison Hot Springs to fill my truck and several five-gallon jerry cans with gasoline for the quad and the cabin’s gas-powered generator. I had already stocked up on enough groceries and other necessities to last a couple of weeks if I chose to stay that long. I planned to make that decision once at the cabin.

It was during my stop for fuel that I first encountered the man who would become my final victim.

He was one of those creepy eighties-wanna-be muscle-car dorks. I wouldn’t have given him a second glance if it hadn’t been for the gaudy beast of a car he was driving.

I was inside the store, waiting in line to pay for my fuel when he pulled into the station. The throaty rumble of the engine barely obscured the eighties heavy metal music that vomited out of the car’s speakers. I didn’t mind a little rock music, but this was downright obscene. The deep boom of the subwoofer was felt as much as heard; vibrating my guts and rattling the store windows.

Everything about him screamed, “Look at me, everyone!”

I hated myself for looking but couldn’t help it.

My view of my own vehicle was now obscured by an orange muscle-car monstrosity. The souped-up seventies model Buick Skylark was an Orange-Crush nightmare with two wide black stripes painted over the hood, roof and trunk. The music died when the driver shut off the engine.

He jumped out of the car and slammed the driver’s door a little harder than was necessary, then stormed angrily to the other side and opened the passenger door. The passenger side of the car faced the store and I had a clear view of the back seat as the man leaned into the car and began to vigorously wipe the back seat with a white rag.

I caught my breath in horror when I realized that it wasn’t a rag.

The asshole had a dog!

He had the little white dog by the neck and was roughly rubbing its face back and forth across the seat. The tiny puppy squealed and struggled to free itself from the man’s cruel hands. It appeared that the dirtbag was angry because the puppy had had an accident in the car and he was punishing the poor little thing by rubbing its face in its own waste.

A familiar rage began to boil deep inside my gut as I hurriedly tossed a credit card at the gas station clerk to pay for my purchase, keeping an eye on the animal abuser.

As I emerged from the store, I watched, swallowing the bitter rage that rose in my throat as he roughly shoved the little dog into an animal carrier.

He cursed and swore as he grabbed some paper towels from the dispenser near the fuel pumps and went about cleaning up the mess that the dog had left on the seat of his big orange goof-mobile. A mess which wouldn’t have been much to clean up had he not just made it about ten times worse by smearing it all over the seat in his attempt to punish the dog.

I swear I would have let him live if it hadn’t been for the dog.

My first impulse was to grab the son-of-a-bitch and give him the shitkicking of his life. I then thought about the two handguns, three rifles and the twelve-gauge shotgun I had stowed behind the seat of my truck. I planned to do a bit of target practice while at the cabin and maybe even bag myself a spring bear.

I was now aware of how badly I wanted to pump a few rounds into his empty skull. That little dog needed help.

I walked slowly past the front of his car, making a mental note of as many details as possible; the license number; the stupid macho nude-girl air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror; the camping pass on his dash. He had been staying at one of the campsites up the lake, in the general direction of my cabin. The pass was dated for April 23. Today’s date was the 21, which meant he was paid up for two more nights and would most likely be returning to the campsite. As it happened, I was headed in the same direction.

I pulled the elastic from my hair and added a feminine swing to my walk as I sauntered slowly toward my truck, instantly making the visual transformation from androgynous I’m-not-sure-but-I-think-he’s-a-dude to sexy, athletic-looking female.

I strolled over to my truck, taking as much time as possible as I looked over the Yamaha all-terrain vehicle that I had securely strapped down inside the box of the pickup. I pretended to be checking it over and fixing something that wasn’t secured, all the while watching the orange-car douchebag out of the corner of one eye. He’d seen me but wasn’t paying much attention.

It was time to turn up the heat a notch and activate my secret weapon – the foolproof moron magnet.

I reached inside the cab of my truck and popped the hood, then leaned over the engine, looking at it helplessly as if baffled and befuddled by the mystical contraption before me.

One thing I had learned during my time on this earth was that a woman with an open hood was an instant homing device for every horny man within a two-mile radius. Nothing drew the idiots quicker than the sight of a female (or someone who appeared to be female) with her head inside an engine compartment. And nothing pissed off a macho on-the-make idiot more than mistaking a long-haired man for a woman. With my long golden mane, fine features and slender build, it had happened to me plenty of times and I’d gotten into more than my share of fistfights over it. I’d never understood what motivated them to try to beat the shit out of me once they learned that I wasn’t just some dumb piece of pussy. It was as if they had to prove their heterosexuality by punching the daylights out of a guy for being too pretty.

The funny part was, even though I didn’t have a dick, I could easily attract (and satisfy) more women than those testosterone-laden knuckle-draggers could ever hope to. The other funny part was that some of the men who tried to come to my rescue didn’t know the first thing about mechanics and were as clueless under the hood as they assumed I was.

I was more than capable of taking care of myself. I wasn’t afraid to exchange blows with any asshole who had a problem with the way I looked and I rarely lost a fight, even against an opponent twice my size.

Still, I had made it a general rule to never check my oil at a gas station or any other public place where morons had a tendency to congregate. I figured one day my luck might run out. I’d find myself up against someone I couldn’t handle and I’d end up getting hurt, or worse. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d been doing some routine maintenance to my vehicle such as checking the oil or topping up the rad and been approached by some fucktard with a lame-ass opening line like,

“Having some trouble?”

He had noticed me and as predicted, had fallen for the bait.

After finishing his cleanup job and disposing of the soiled paper towels, he had seen me looking under my hood and wandered over to offer assistance.

I peeked demurely out from under my hair, which had fallen across my face.

“Depends on what you mean by trouble,” I purred. I gave him a suggestive smile as I straightened up and pulled my dipstick, pretending to check my oil. I didn’t have a paper towel handy, so I cleaned the oil from the stick with my fingers and then wiped them on my jeans, the way I usually did. The orange-car greaseball smiled. I’d had a feeling he’d like that; he looked like the type who hung out with girls who were a little on the rough side. I was both rough and pretty – a dirtbag’s dream come true.

I made a quick assessment of the man who was to become my next victim. He was a skinny, geekish creature with a pinched, ratlike little face and glasses. His blotchy, grayish complexion and sucked-in cheekbones suggested either substance abuse or the advanced stages of an illness such as cancer or hepatitis. I was willing to bet money that drugs were responsible for his unhealthy look.

He reeked of marijuana and tobacco, but his appearance suggested something else as well. I went through the list of likely culprits in my mind: Crack; crystal meth; bath salts; maybe heroin. I guessed that his angry outburst toward the little dog was fueled by a stimulant such as methamphetamine or cocaine. He smiled a thin-lipped grin, revealing an uneven row of blackening, stubby teeth. It confirmed my suspicions.

Meth mouth
, I thought.

Great
. I was dealing with an animal-hating tweaker.

“That’s quite the machine you have there,” he said, strolling toward the back of my pickup to admire my quad.

“Thanks.” I followed him as he walked around the truck to examine the ATV from all angles.

“Is that a Grizzly?” he asked, the envy obvious in his voice.

“Yep. Grizzly 700,” I said proudly, “it’s my baby. 686cc’s of kick-ass, right there. What a ride!”

“I’ll bet,” he agreed, whistling softly in admiration. “I’m Pete, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Pete. I’m Lacey.” I was relieved that he made no move to offer a handshake because I preferred not to touch him.

“Well, helloo La-cey,” he said slowly, repeating my standard pseudonym in a mimicking fashion that made me want to knock his rotten little stumps of teeth down his reeking throat.

“You’ve got quite the machine there yourself, Pete,” I said evenly, concealing the fury I felt inside as I walked toward the obnoxious orange muscle car. “Did you do the work yourself?”

“Nope. Bought it like this. This is way better than factory.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” I agreed as I leaned into the window, looking toward the back seat, hoping to get a glimpse of the dog. The animal carrier sat on the back seat and the little dog cowered near the back of the cage. A slight odor of dog feces wafted up from the interior of the car, in spite of it having just been cleaned. It was probably coming from the dog itself. Rage burned in my chest once more and I breathed out slowly to keep it under control.

“You from around here?” he asked me.

“No, but I have a cabin up the lake. I’m going there now. Going to spend some quality time alone with my quad.” I walked around to the front of the Buick, pretending to admire the car. I pointed at the camping pass. “You camping up at Pine Point? That’s not far from my place.”